muesli"The Algorithm". I'm sorry, but this is just embarrassing.
c-x-b 
@fribbledom incredible. any clues on what it does with that or
@fribbledom ah, found an apparent clue: https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/7f90d0ca342b928b479b512ec51ac2c3821f5922/home-mixer/server/src/main/scala/com/twitter/home_mixer/functional_component/feature_hydrator/RequestQueryFeatureHydrator.scala#L86-L93
These author ID lists are used purely for metrics collection. We track how often we are serving Tweets from these authors and how often their tweets are being impressed by users. This helps us validate in our A/B experimentation platform that we do not ship changes that negatively impacts one group over others.
is this actually true? eh, hard to say, but it's not the most unbelievable lie they could've published. I'm not the most fluent Scala user, but it looks like this is a from a hardcoded list fed in from outside or something.
Jonas Eschenburg@cxberger why should it be a lie? They got accused of favoring one group over the other so many times it makes sense to have some actual numbers.
@indyjonas i honestly don't care what they're doing with those numbers in the least right now but would rather not be crucified for "uncritically parroting whatever Twitter says" or something like that. i can't actually verify or refute that claim so it's just however much you trust Twitter's word on it
gecko@cxberger @fribbledom Some people on birdsite said it's just for reporting. I searched for occurrences of the containing class and followed the chain up, it seems to be only used in 1 file, with the following comment:
/**
* Side effect that logs served tweet metrics to Scribe as client events.
*/
So, at a glance it seems like they're right. I'd guess the elon field got added when he was demanding to know why his tweets weren't getting more impressions.
@cxberger @fribbledom OK now this is an interesting conspiracy: https://mastodon.social/@rodhilton/110120753311723993
It could all be for show, and they specifically added it so that they could remove it and say "hey look we're taking politics out of the code"
It could all be for show, and they specifically added it so that they could remove it and say "hey look we're taking politics out of the code"